Brigaldara owner says climate change is scary, but heritage must endure

Antonio Cesari, the owner of the century-old Italian winery Brigaldara, faces a set of challenges that his father Stefano Cesari did not have to contend with when he began distributing the family’s wines in 1979. One of the younger Cesari's concerns is climate change, which has made weather conditions in Valpolicella, a renowned wine-producing region in Italy, more extreme than ever. For a traditional winery like Brigaldara, which depends on nature, the heat waves and wildfires now rampaging across the Europe are hard to ignore. But Cesari keeps reminding himself of what he can and cannot control. Cesari noted that while France, Spain and Greece are currently experiencing massive wildfires, Italy hasn’t experienced natural disasters on the same scale this year. "Still, it has been warmer than Korea in Italy and it has been like that almost all summer. The quantity of water is now almost zero and it’s going to be quite difficult. In January, meanwhile, the cold was so extreme we got 10 days under zero degree Celsius. That wasn’t normal for Mediterranean,” Cesari said at a press